In the last few weeks, news about the Rhode Island judiciary has been dominated by accounts of how retired Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank J. Williams is embroiled in a messy divorce case involving his former driver.

The driver’s estranged husband claims Williams is largely responsible for the dissolution of the marriage and has testified that the judge would sit in the bathroom and sip wine while his 6-year-old daughter (Williams’ goddaughter) bathed in the tub. Maybe Williams will take the stand and explain everything. But in terms of sheer oddness, the story is rivaling the “balloon boy” saga.

Thankfully, there is a bigger picture when it comes to Rhode Island’s judicial system, and that picture will come into sharper focus during a Nov. 13 symposium at the Roger Williams University School of Law.

The event is titled “Judicial Selection in Rhode Island: Assessing the 15-year Experience with ‘Merit Selection.’ ” The topic merits thoughtful analysis because a decade and a half has passed since we began using a “merit selection” process to screen state judicial candidates. Voters approved that new process after two successive Supreme Court chief justices resigned under threat of impeachment. (Williams was chosen under the merit selection process.)

Has the system improved? Are our judges more productive, influential and independent? Are we appointing more women and minorities? Or are we using a new version of the same old system? To become a judge, do you still have to know a guy at the State House?

“These are really important conversations to have — to try to move the debate and the analysis beyond anecdote and to data and reality,” said Roger Williams University law Prof. Michael J. Yelnosky, who is organizing the event. “Everybody has their poster child or horror story about judicial selection in Rhode Island. We could all name five names: How did such-and-such get the gig? But that’s only so helpful. This stuff can help us think more deeply about what the strengths and weaknesses are of our selection process, our bar, the players in state government, and not remain fixated on the fact that somebody very politically connected got a judgeship. That happens everywhere.”

Rather than dismissing the horror stories, Yelnosky said his message is: “There is a larger and richer story to be told.”

He will make a presentation about the backgrounds of those selected for state judgeships before and after merit selection was adopted in 1994. For example, preliminary findings reveal that merit selection has not produced a greater percentage of women on the bench; the proportion remains about 25 percent.

But preliminary figures show the proportion of judges who previously worked in state government has fallen from 71 percent to about 55 percent since merit selection began, and the proportion of judges who were legislators or lawyers to legislative leaders has dropped from 33 percent to about 20 percent, he said.

“If it does turn out that the State House is less of a route to the bench, many proponents of merit selection would say that is a positive,” Yelnosky said.

He also looked at where state judges went to school. (Is there a path besides La Salle Academy/Providence College/Suffolk University law school?) He found the proportion of judges who attended Providence College has dropped from 32 percent before merit selection to about 22 percent. The proportion of judges who attended Boston University law school has dropped from 32 percent to about 15 percent, and the proportion of judges who attended Suffolk law school has risen from 28 percent to 37 percent.

Overall, fewer of today’s judges attended the nation’s most prestigious law schools, Yelnosky said. “It appears there might be a general trend here, at least in terms of law school pedigree, toward less prestigious law schools,” he said.

While Yelnosky will talk about the background of judges, Mirya R. Holman, an empirical research associate at the Duke University law school, will talk about the performance of the state Supreme Court before and after merit selection. She said she is analyzing data that attempts to gauge the productivity, influence and independence of judges.

She will build on an analysis, published in the Duke Law Journal this year, by New York University law Prof. Stephen J. Choi, Duke University law Prof. Mitu Gulati and University of Chicago law Prof. Eric A. Posner (with research assistance from Holman). That analysis ranked Rhode Island’s high court 37th in productivity, 40th in citations by out-of-state courts and first in independence.

That’s right: We ranked No. 1 in terms of judicial independence — good news for a state that has the Independent Man standing proudly atop its State House.

But let’s take a closer look at what it means. The analysis focuses on cases decided from 1998 to 2000, so for the most part it reflects the independence of judges who are no longer on the Supreme Court.

The researchers measured the influence of opinions by tallying how many times those decisions were cited by out-of-state courts, so it made sense to look at 1998 to 2000 because they needed to allow time for citations to occur. But it also means that only one current Supreme Court justice — Maureen McKenna Goldberg — was on the court in the period that was analyzed. Holman said the analysis looked at a Supreme Court that included Justice John P. Bourcier (who died in 2002), Justice Robert G. Flanders Jr. (who resigned in 2004), Justice Victoria S. Lederberg (who died in 2002) and Chief Justice Joseph R. Weisberger (who retired in 2001).

How do you measure independence? The Duke Law Journal article said independence “refers to the judge’s ability to withstand partisan pressures, or disinclination to indulge partisan preferences.” So, for example, a Democratic judge would get points for siding with Republican judges in a dissent or majority opinion.

HOW DO YOU decide which party a judge belongs to? Holman said researchers tried to independently determine a judge’s party, and concluded Flanders and Goldberg were Republicans and Lederberg was a Democrat. They weren’t sure about Weisberger and Bourcier, so they looked at who originally nominated them. Since the Democratic-controlled legislature (Grand Committee) chose Weisberger before merit selection, researchers treated him as a Democrat (although The Providence Journal has noted he served as a Republican state Senate leader before becoming a judge). Bourcier was considered a Republican based on his appointment by former GOP Gov. Lincoln C. Almond (although The Journal has said Bourcier was a Democrat before becoming a judge). So some recalculation might be in order.

The Duke Law Journal says Rhode Island’s judiciary “has not traditionally ranked high on citation counts, perhaps because of its small size and the presence of its dominant neighbor, Massachusetts.” But it says Little Rhody “dominates the rankings” on independence.

The article notes Rhode Island’s judiciary has been criticized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which uses surveys of business lawyers to rank states on what it considers “legal fairness.” But it says Rhode Island’s “high scores on our measures suggest at least the possibility that the criticisms of the Rhode Island court might be misplaced.”

“That said,” the article adds, “Rhode Island’s judiciary had some high profile corruption scandals in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, in which two chief justices were forced to resign. Perhaps our results show that the reforms instituted in 1994 were successful.”

Perhaps. I wonder if the lifetime tenure that Rhode Island judges enjoy produces greater independence. Yelnosky said the independence ranking might reflect “a narrow ideological range between Democrats and Republicans in Rhode Island,” or it might reflect that our judges are nonpartisan.

Yelnosky noted the Duke Law Journal analysis included some judges who took the bench before merit selection. So, he said, we’ll know more when Holman completes her analysis of the Supreme Court before and after merit selection. (She’s analyzing the high court from 1989 to 1991 and from 2005 to 2007.)

Stay tuned. The Nov. 13 symposium, which is free and open to the public, will run from noon to 5:30 p.m. at the law school. For more information, go to http://law.rwu.edu/news/events.

efitzpat@projo.com